Combating negativity

I wrote this in a comment on SERoundtable and Barry Schwartz beat me to the punch recently. Danny also addressed it in passing in a Q&A with Matt Cutts, but I wanted to elaborate on this even more. Think of this as an open letter to Google, or just a general expression of how I feel about this conversation. It honestly doesn’t matter to me. The bottom line is that I think this issue could easily be avoided and search engines should have no issue implementing this. What I think Google in particular is failing to realize, is that there are good SEO’s out there that want to help them succeed. I mean, of course we all want our clients to out rank their competitors, but there is a big part of us that I think Google has “won over”, so helping them improve their engine, would be a win for not just our clients but the SEO community as a whole. How I See This Working We submit things to Google all the time. We submit, XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, and we even … [Read more...] about Should We Disavow Links To Combat Negative SEO?

The past month or so, I’ve been losing sleep over negative SEO. And trust me: of all the things that I could be doing other than sleeping, thinking about negative SEO is at the bottom of that list. Maybe it’s the surge in extortion emails surfacing. Maybe it’s Google continually softening its stance on whether negative SEO actually does exist. Maybe it’s my own paranoia. Regardless, I’ve wrestled with this internally for quite some time, and it’s time to get these thoughts on paper. First, The Basics Negative SEO is when someone attempts to ruin your organic rankings through practices that violate the search engines’ algorithm. It’s a real threat — especially for smaller businesses whose lifelines are their organic search rankings. When you consider that organic search makes up 51% of all website traffic, it’s something every digital marketer needs to at least be mildly concerned about. Your backlink profile is the most common … [Read more...] about Should You Really Spend Your Time (And Resources) On Negative SEO?

The email starts off with “This is an extortion email” and goes on to say if you do not pay a certain amount of money, the sender will hit your website with tactics they call negative SEO. Now what? Yes, negative SEO exists and can impact your site’s performance on Google. Scraped content from your website, spammy links, and unnatural anchor text are all evidence that your site might have been a victim of negative SEO. While it is difficult to avoid an attack, especially for larger sites, it is not impossible to stay protected. What Exactly is Negative SEO? Negative SEO is when someone uses unethical, black hat techniques to harm a website’s rankings in the search results. Basically, they do everything Google says not to do in order to make it look you are violating Google policies. Although negative SEO can take different forms, here are some common ways your site can be attacked:
Building bad links to your site using unrelated keywords Hacking your website … [Read more...] about How to Combat and Recover from Negative SEO Attack?

Negative SEO is something of a boogeyman. Some will say it doesn’t exist. Some say it exists, but it’s largely ineffective. Some are in awe of its power, claiming it’s capable of taking down even top ranked sites. Still others claimed to have personal experience with it, either as a victim or as part of a history with black hat SEO. On black hat forums, it’s regarded with reverence, just another tool in the toolbox. The way negative SEO works is by simulating unnatural link building activity against other sites. By showing Google that thousands of junk links are being built in an attempt to manipulate your website’s rankings, it’s possible that Google can penalize and/or deindex your site completely – when you have done nothing wrong. Whether or not it’s a threat, and whether or not it’s effective at trashing a young site, it’s worth taking steps to immunize your site against it. Why? Simple: the techniques used to protect … [Read more...] about How to Immunize a New Website Against Negative SEO

Working with negative keywords is one of those areas of AdWords that can make you or break you. I’ve been an avid fan of negative keywords even since I wrote my first AdWords book in 2010, where I proclaimed that you should spend as much time researching negative keywords as you do researching regular keywords. Today, four years later, I still optimize by this mantra. Since 2010, I’ve worked on hundreds of AdWords accounts, and I have developed negative keyword strategies that can more than double the impact of your existing negative keyword list. The difference between how big of an impact your negative keywords have on your campaign performance is directly linked with how much you focus on the details. Being attentive to details will allow you to see negative keyword opportunities where you didn’t see them before. Follow these six tips and you’ll start seeing how professional AdWords consultants manage to build effective negative keyword lists. 1) Add Negative … [Read more...] about 6 Tactics to Double the Impact of Your Negative Keywords